Dear readers,
Happy Juneteenth–one of the ways in which various western societies are beginning to reckon with their involvements in historic colonialism and slavery. Another example is a new exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam which attempts to address the impact of slavery in the Dutch empire as depicted in visual culture, both at home and in its colonies in Southeast Asia, South Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and elsewhere. This exhibition is only groundbreaking relative to a long-standing lack of acknowledgement among the Dutch that their wealth, especially during the ‘golden age’ of the 17th century, was built on colonialism and slavery. Let us, then, turn to the origins of the Dutch colonial empire, which fuelled a Dutch golden (bond)age.
The Dutch rise to overseas empire was a rapid one. In the late sixteenth century, the Netherlands fought for independence against their Spanish Habsburg overlords. The leader of the revolt was William I of Orange, who helped unite the provinces of the Netherlands and exploited the topography of the Low Countries in various conflicts against the Spanish. William was assassinated by a Catholic nobleman in 1584–the first assassination of a head of state by handgun–but his successors continued the revolts, which eventually led to formal recognition of independence in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. By the early 17th century, the Dutch had set up several companies to carry out trade overseas, the basis of the Dutch empire of trade especially in Asia and the West Indies. As described in the July 27, 2019 issue of Early Modern Times, the philosopher Hugo Grotius was particularly influential in justifying Dutch piracy against the Portuguese and Spanish (who claimed a global monopoly of trade) on the grounds that all nations have an unlimited right to free trade and to the freedom of the seas. This became the theoretical basis for a new wave of overseas colonialism and imperialism, which would lead to the use of slaves and the emergence of racial distinctions between whites and their subject peoples. Dutch empire, then, had libert-Aryan origins.
The Dutch East India and West India Companies quickly established trading routes, ports, and colonies over the course of the seventeenth century. Although Grotius had earlier argued vociferously against the idea that a country could possess any part of the sea, he soon reversed his position when the Dutch began to dominate overseas trade and were opposed by British and French claims. Like their erstwhile Spanish overlords and their other European rivals, the Dutch set up sugar plantations in the Caribbean and South America, including Surinam (depicted above in a 1707 painting by Dirk Valkenburg)–which also happens to be the birthplace of my paternal grandmother, but that’s another story. With the depopulation of Indigenous peoples due to disease and warfare, the Dutch like other Europeans purchased or captured slaves from Africa and transported them across the Atlantic to work on their plantations. Such dehumanisation of human chattel rendered the latter Surinameless.
In the Netherlands, slavery was illegal, but that did not impact the enslavement of human beings in the Dutch colonies. Black servants were often brought to the mother country of their masters; hence, Rembrandt’s studio was located in a part of Amsterdam which contained the largest concentration of Black people in the Netherlands, and many Dutch today have African as well as Asian ancestry. As this Feb. 2021 article notes, some of Rembrandt’s portraits explicitly depict Dutch citizens who profited from colonialism and slavery, though he also painted a sympathetic portrait of two African men in 1661. In contrast to the latter piece, however, Black servants were mostly regarded as status symbols and commodity items: either in the background of group portraits of their white masters, or even worse, alongside other ‘exotic’ objects–such as lobsters and tropical fruits–in still-life paintings. From the perspective of the Black servants, this was more a genre of ‘steal lives’.
The Rijksmuseum exhibition attempts to highlight the stories of those who fought against the system. These include escaped slaves, as well as Tula, a man who led a revolt in the Dutch colony of Curaçao. When the French Republican army conquered the Netherlands in 1795, Tula–inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution–asserted the Rights of Man in the Dutch colony. The slave revolt lasted a month, but things went Cura-sour: the revolt was suppressed, and Tula was captured and executed. This episode was forgotten, and slavery was not abolished in the Dutch empire until 1863, decades after abolition by the British and French. Many Dutch people today perceive their society to be a tolerant one and lacking in racism, and yet the legacy of colonialism and racism persists in, for example, the Christmas tradition of Zwarte Piet: Santa Claus’s black-faced assistant. Since 2011, more of the population are in favour of changing this tradition, and there is a project afoot to create a National Dutch Trans-Atlantic Slavery Museum. The Rijksmuseum exhibition, then, may be seen as one effort to set the historical record straight and try to make things Rijk.
Till next time,
Simon Kow
Director (until June 30), Early Modern Amsterdamnation Studies Program
